dragging entities any tips

[hellomoto]

I often get this error message when i free drag entities in a sketch: Unable to regenerate with current dimension value(s). I've tried tedious things like unlinking points and deleting constraints and even redrawing the entity (which brings other issues).

So, is there a setting or option to make free dragging entities possible?

I turned off intent manager, but then a whole new menu pops up and boy, it's not easy trying to figure it out. My coworkers are in the same boat. We're used to working with intent manager on. My gut tells me that the solution is to turn off intent manager, but the result is most likely not any more convenient than what i'm doing now to modify sketches.


Any ideas, settings, best practices, etc?

moto

Newbie, WF2.0 M070, WinXp

 

[jabbadeus]

Sketch modeis so much easier with the Intent Manager turned on...


My gut instinct suggests that your sketches may be too complicated. Some people advocate fewer features in a model, so they create sketches that try to do everything. But Pro/Engineer is actually more parametric and flexible for making changes later if your sketches are simpler. For example, rather than putting fillets in sketches, they should be their own separate round feature. Same thing goes for chamfers. Don't place multiple holes or cuts in the same sketch; again, for flexibility, design them as separate features. A good rule of thumb is that if your sketches contain more than a dozen entities or so, they are probably getting too complicated. (That's just a guideline, not a commandment.)


But in general, you should be able to drag entities freely in the sketch.

 

[jbuckl]

My 2 p:- persevere without intent manager to get what you want, after all who needs another manager anyway.


Sketcher is a hugely powerful basis of everything you model.


Personally,I feltintent manager was only introduced to help ptc salesmen because really gettting to know sketcher took too long during the evaluation / sales process.


I do use intent manager, but only 5% of the time, for the functions that cant be done so quickly without and thats only about 5% of what I need.

 

[mjcole_ptc]

In my opinion for best practices you should select all dimensions in
your sketch and then Right Click and select lock. Then using your ctrl
key select the dims you want to change while draging your sketch
entities and unlock them. This will prevent you from having arcs circle
around on screen or have dims you don't want to change get modified by
constraints.



It will also help to set the following config option in your config.pro

sketcher_lock_modified_dims yes



Dimensions that you enter specific values for shouldn't change when you
are dragging other entities and this option is a great help for
succesful sketch entity dragging in sketch.



Michael